The Detroit Free Press has been "on guard" for 187 years. We take that responsibility very seriously.

Our investigative journalists dig to uncover problems in metro Detroit and around Michigan — working to make our communities better. In 2018, the Free Press exposed issues that affect Michigan residents from all walks of life.

And our work got results. Keep scrolling to see highlights of our best investigations of the year:

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The University of Michigan's endowment is complicated. Here's a look at how it works.
Mike Thompson/Detroit Free Press

College is getting very expensive, even out of reach for some. So why are the savings accounts at universities across the country bursting at the seams and worth more than $567 billion? The University of Michigan, alone, has stockpiled one of the nation's largest endowments at more than $11 billion.

We discovered university officials invested a good chunk of that endowment in hundreds of private funds across the world that — as our investigation uncovered — often were run by its own donors and alumni advisers. That’s a big conflict to some folks.

Among our other findings: While families shelled out more for tuition year after year, university leaders could have shelled out more money for tuition assistance — but chose not to.

Nobody we could find had ever counted the number of reserve police officers in Michigan. So we did, and we found more than 3,000 spread around the state. That matters because in many cases these officers look just like real cops — even though they aren't. They are unlicensed civilian volunteers.

Worse, some of them have no training. You might not know that if you’re pulled over late at night. Many reserves do good things, but we found many examples of reserves committing crimes, misusing their authority and pretending to be something they are not.

Our investigation highlighted how the Michigan Commission on Law Enforcement Standards, which oversees regular cops, had done nothing to regulate reserve officers, despite getting the OK to do so more than a year and a half before our project published. After our stories, MCOLES announced the formation of a committee to start looking into changes.

Over 25 hours of video and audio detail an ATV crash in Detroit involving 15-year-old Damon Grimes, who was allegedly tased by Michigan State Police trooper Mark Bessner during a chase in August of 2017.

Readers had known about the tragic death of 15-year-old Damon Grimes, who crashed his ATV while running from State Police in Detroit. People knew a trooper had been charged with murder after leaning out of his patrol car to use his Taser on Grimes, causing the crash. But the details were limited.

That’s until the Free Press used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents, raw video and radio broadcasts to reconstruct the scene before, during and after the accident. In a published story and never-before-seen video, the newspaper shined a spotlight on the actions of police that day. The video was made by piecing together hours of video and audio footage from police body cameras, dashboard cameras, surveillance tape and broadcasts. A Detroit officer whose inappropriate comments were caught on the video was reassigned.

When our reporters detailed allegations that Centria Healthcare, Michigan’s largest autism therapy provider, had been running a Medicaid fraud scheme, and that the Michigan Attorney General's Office had opened its own investigation, state officials noticed. The Michigan Economic Development Commission put an immediate halt on an $8 million state grant designed to keep Centria from moving out of state. State officials eventually rescinded the grant.

Sugar jumped out of a window in May to confront three strangers approaching this Detroit Land Bank Authority house in the 11400 block of Mendota on Detroit's west side. (Photo taken May 10, 2018)(Photo: Junfu Han, Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press)

We also brought into sharp focus an inner-city problem like no other.
Detroit has the worst squatter problem in the nation.

The Detroit Land Bank owns nearly 30,000 residential structures in the city, and with as many as 4,300 of them illegally occupied — it's a magnitude unlike any other place. Police have found dead bodies, wild dogs and drugs inside these houses.

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There are as many as 4,300 houses occupied by squatters across the city of Detroit.
Wochit

Squatters are a tricky problem: remove them and add to the city's homeless population and its massive inventory of abandoned buildings. Let them stay, and the land bank is summoned often to investigate what some of its occupants may be up to: dog fighting, prostitution, drug dealing, overdoses, gambling, gun possession or running a chop shop. Land Bank properties also have been homes to murders, with at least 50 homicides over the last four years.

Our investigation found the land bank had turned only a fraction of its occupants into homeowners, one of its stated objectives, and had only two initiatives to make that happen. The land bank doesn't have the money to maintain and secure all 30,000 of its residential structures, so neighbors have taken on the job of keeping squatters out of some of these houses. Today the squatter problem persists. There is no simple solution.

Another investigation revealed that while Detroit’s demolition efforts had been fueled by more than $148 million at the time, only 26 percent of that work had gone toward minority-owned companies.

We looked at demolitions performed through the Detroit Land Bank from the start of 2014, when it first began to receive federal dollars. But a significant amount of demolitions in Detroit are also performed using city dollars.

We found just 16 percent of the federal money disbursed for the program went to black-owned firms, raising concerns among some city leaders who argued more minorities and Detroiters who own qualified firms should have access to the lucrative contracts.

When Little Caesars Arena rose from the ground with great fanfare, people paid little attention to the parking lots that sprung up all around it. But we did.

We found the Ilitch family organization could make as much as $1 million more annually from their lots, thanks to favorable rulings from Detroit’s building department that allowed the lots to be designed differently than the zoning code required and that other builders followed.

The Detroit Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environmental Department approved permits dating to 2016 allowing the Ilitch family’s parking companies to build or renovate 18 parking lots throughout the Cass Corridor without including any of the landscaping inside the lots that is mandatory under the city’s zoning code.

By our count, without having to adhere to the rules, the parking lots had room for 269 extra spaces, which could mean an extra $1 million annually in parking revenues from fans and concert-goers attending events at the LCA. After our expose, City Council voted to tighten up the zoning requirements.

A pedestrian crosses Gratiot Avenue in Detroit on Tuesday, June 26, 2018. The stretch of Gratiot Avenue between Linnhurst Street and 7 Mile Road has been the site of numerous pedestrian fatalities.(Photo: Cameron Pollack, Detroit Free Press)

Our project called "Death on Foot" showed that the nation’s SUV boom is a key factor in a dramatic rise in U.S. pedestrian deaths, up 46 percent since 2009.

We partnered with the USA Today Network on a national investigation that found federal regulators had known for years that SUVs, with their higher front-end profile, were at least twice as likely as cars to kill pedestrians — but a proposal to factor foot traffic into vehicle safety ratings had stalled.

The investigation significantly raised awareness of these deaths, which have not been widely publicized. More than 400,000 people across the nation read the report, which then became the subject of a webinar featuring our journalists and sponsored by Smart Growth America. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration told the Free Press it was "working on a proposal for a standard that would require protection against head and leg injuries for pedestrians impacted by the front end of vehicles."

A Detroit woman seeks comfort after she and a friend got raped by a gunman while vacationing in Jamaica on Sept. 27, 2018.
The victim, who is on the right, got the gun and shot the attacker, who is in police custody. The other victim is not pictured.
(Photo: Tresa Baldas, Detroit Free Press)

Our investigation started after the rapes of two Detroit women at an all-inclusive resort and found that tourist sexual assaults are a long-standing and unchecked problem in Jamaica, where an estimated one American is raped every month.

The initial investigation, which generated more than 1.6 million pageviews, included the voices of multiple victims who said their sexual assaults were ignored, years' worth of State Department data that highlighted the problem and multiple State Department warnings that described sexual assaults at resorts as an "historic" and "troubling" problem in Jamaica.

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The rapes of two Detroit women at a Jamaican resort has highlighted a pervasive problem on the island getaway: sexual assaults are ignored.
Tresa Baldas, Detroit Free Press

Our coverage also revealed another issue: cover-ups by the resorts. We detailed the accounts of multiple victims who came forward with stories about cover-ups, confidentiality agreements and payoffs by resorts looking to protect their reputations and revenue. The investigation caught the attention of Good Morning America, which interviewed Free Press reporter Tresa Baldas about the investigation and what led her to pursue it. It also has triggered action in Jamaica, whose Ministry of Tourism called for an audit of all of the island's resorts in the wake of the investigation.

Records from the Detroit Public Schools Community District show it owns 117 license plates. However, 5 plates are assigned to two different cars.(Photo: Photo illustration by Brian McNamara/Detroit Free Press)

A Free Press investigation found that as many as 560 license plates belonging to the state’s largest school district had vanished. That’s a problem because these municipal plates have no renewal fees and can be used on any vehicle, so good luck reporting a reckless driver who has obtained an unauthorized municipal plate.

That's not theoretical. The Free Press spotted a municipal plate that belonged to the Detroit Public Schools Community District on a Chevy Cavalier driving north on Southfield in Lathrup Village one afternoon.

Readers responded to the story with tips and photographs about questionable municipal and other license plates they spotted on the road.

We dug into how property speculation has exacerbated Detroit's dysfunctional housing market, tracking down the chain of title for 23 houses that were lost to tax foreclosure in 2012 and 2013 and were subsequently sold at the annual Wayne County Tax Auction to speculators.

Those speculators rented the properties out in predatory rent-to-own schemes or, as was more common, sat on them, hoping to see an increased value over time. While 78 percent of the homes were occupied in 2011, 78 percent were vacant, demolished or burned down by the spring of 2018.

Notably, 60 percent ended up back in the tax auction in 2016, which means none of the speculators ever paid taxes on the properties themselves. The tax auction was intended to spark new ownership — and therefore usage — of abandoned spaces and recoup funds. One could argue, based on this investigation, that this was not happening.

We found that two blighted properties that are owned by the Ilitch family had not received blight tickets since 2009, the year the family purchased them. This absence of ticketing existed though both buildings were routinely inspected and yet still lacked windows and were not securely closed — two violations of city code that are supposed to lead to fines.

Our investigation led to an immediate issuance of a correction notice, demanding that the owners register the vacant building, secure a required Certificate of Compliance and correct failures to maintain vacant buildings or structures in accordance with city code.